Our Privacy Policy
Talisman Music maintains mailing lists for announcing our performances and products, and related information. We also offer products for sale through our web store, using PayPal for secure online ordering and payment.
We take the issue of online privacy very seriously. Rest assured that, whether you join our mailing list or order from our web store, your name, e-mail address, and other personal information will never be used for unrelated purposes or made available to anyone else for any reason. We do not add people to our mailing lists unless specifically requested, and if you do join our mailing list(s) we will not flood your mailbox with unnecessarily frequent messages. Once or twice a month (usually less often) is typical.
About Spam and Privacy
We are also committed to helping you protect your own online privacy and eliminate unwanted spam e-mail. The volume of spam e-mail on the internet has increased exponentially in the past few years, going from a mere annoyance to what amounts to a throbbing, global migraine headache. Below are some ideas we hope you will find useful in dealing with the issue of spam.
TIP: Get MailWasher Pro
We used MailWasher for several years and we are so satisfied with it that we became a Firetrust affiliate site. We would still use it, if only it ran on Mac OS. If you are fed up with all the spam and you are in the market for a top-quality, easy-to-use tool for cleaning the spam out of your inbox, please click here to find out more about MailWasher and to download your own copy. This program is very good at what it is designed to do, reasonable in price, and well supported by its developer, Firetrust, Ltd. of New Zealand.
TIP: Use BCC: on your group e-mails
Many people send e-mail messages to a group (large or small) of others, to announce events, share jokes, pass on family or club news, etc. Quite often, recipients of such messages can see the e-mail addresses of ALL the other recipents, because the sender put all of those people on a TO: line when addressing the message. Now, I would never take advantage of that situation by harvesting addresses to add all these other people to my own promotional mailing lists. But I'm never quite so sure about all those other people, who now also have access to my e-mail address. And, when the message gets forwarded (usually with the header intact in the forwarded message) to someone else's group of friends and relations... well, you get the picture.
Here's how to protect the privacy of your friends, associates, and family members when you send out a group mailing. Put only your own e-mail address in the TO: line of your message, and use BCC: for everyone else. BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy. (How's that for arcane and archaic terminology?) It means that nobody will be able to see the name of anyone else receiving the message. So, if you BCC: everyone except yourself, each person receiving your message will see only you and himself or herself in the header.
TIP: Don't encourage them!
Spam is really just an economic problem. If it wasn't profitable to send spam, it would almost certainly stop. Junk postal mailers count on about a 2% response rate. Because e-mail is virtually free, spammers can get by on a far smaller response percentage. But that means they must send to a vastly larger "audience," thereby generating millions upon millions of bogus, often fraudulent, e-mail messages every single day.
So what can we all do to stop the flood of junk email? The answer is simple :
NEVER, EVER BUY ANYTHING ADVERTISED IN A SPAM EMAIL, unless you know and trust the source!
If you do, and if you are lucky enough not to be defrauded
or bilked in the process, you're only encouraging the spammer to keep sending out millions of junk messages.
TIP: Use protection
Furthermore, never respond in any way to spam. An angry reply may feel good at the time, but it could prove to the spammer that your e-mail address is valid and, therefore, more valuable to be sold to other spammers. In most cases, however, the FROM: or REPLY TO: address on the spam is faked, since spamming is illegal in many jurisdictions. Similarly, the "unsubscribe" links in most spam are bogus and, if used, will probably get you on more spam lists. And, of course, any link in a spam message is suspect and should be assiduously ignored. They will most likely do one or more of the following things: identify you as a 'live' e-mail address, take you to a site you'd rather not visit (porn, etc.), attempt to install spyware or malware on your computer, or route you to a "phishing" site that masquerades as, for example, your online banking site, putting you at risk of both fraud and identity theft. To see how easy it is for a spammer to spoof a URL, click the following link http://www.google.com and see what happens (don't worry - it's safe). It pays to use good-quality, up-to-date computer security software on your computers to guard against the various malware, viruses, spyware, -bot programs, trojans, worms, phishing scams, and so on that are out there.
The above generally doesn't apply to legitimate e-mail, but spammers attempt to make it hard for you to distinguish between their messages (spam) and e-mail from legitimate, known sources (not spam) such as your bank, insurance company, on-line retailers, and other companies with whom you do business or from whom you have asked to receive information by e-mail. And, they are constantly changing their methods so they can slip past the latest anti-spam measures. MailWasher Pro can help not only by flagging suspect messages, but by allowing you to preview all messages without fetching any html content from remote web servers and by showing you the real URL destination of the links in any message.
Please do yourself a favor and protect yourself, your computer, your privacy, your identity, and your sanity by learning to identify and avoid possible threats on the internet and by installing and using effective security software on your computer.
TIP: Cut spam dramatically, if you own a domain name
(from the Firetrust newsletter)
"We've had a number of people writing to us this last month saying they get around 2,000-3,000 emails a day. And you thought you had it bad! Anyway, after speaking to these people it turns out, they own their own domain name, e.g. @company.com. Now spammers have little regard to who they send their spam to, so they will try any address at the domain name you own.
"So, instead of just getting email to their own named email address, they were getting email sent to anyone at the domain name they owned. Eg. If they had an email address bob@company.com they were also receiving email addressed to mary@company.com, simon@company.com, mark@company.com, house@company.com, car@company.com, boat@company.com, anything@company.com, xhfrngy@company.com ... (you get the picture) ...
"Once we told them to call their internet provider and to change their email account from a 'catch-all' account to only getting email addressed to their email address, they experienced a huge reduction in spam.
"This is only for people who get email to their own domain name, so don't annoy your internet provider if you don't have one."
